As I lay half-asleep this morning, in that wonderfully disoriented energy state, I was not alarmed. Still half asleep, my mouth chewed its night-time cud, while my throat made soft mewing sounds, like a sick cat. I may have been snoring, I admit. But slowly I became aware that my left ear had folded in upon itself, causing a strong dull ache. My arm too was cramped and wanted extending. So, I flip-flopped and instinctively threw my arm out. Perhaps I was expecting to feel the back of a long lost lover, but I did not. The nerves in my knuckles sent a smack to my brain as they hit a chilly bare floor. Cold, bitter morning grabbed me, and I was awake.
I smelled something stale and smoky. It was me. My skin smelled like a meatball marinated in tequila. My abdominal muscles contracted, and I sat up. My ears rushed and my head pounded. The room though the haze of my newly cracked morning eyes was forbidding and unfamiliar. White, blank walls, no furniture. White sills, white sky, window rattling. An icy wind filtered in and danced around my naked torso. I tossed off the single wool blanket and sprung off the “bed,” a single mattress laid on the hard-wood floor.
My blood was moving much too fast for so early in the morning. I felt dizzy. “I have been kidnapped,” I thought, ” And I must escape,” I reached over for an ashtray that held a fountain of butts and searched for the largest one to smoke. “No wait,” I suddenly thought, “Perhaps it would be more interesting to snoop and figure out who lived here.”
The first articles of clothing available were thick and cotton and black, (and I haven’t changed them yet). I stumbled around a bit, trying to force my still drunk body to behave like a sober one. I put one leg on, then the other while leaning against the door frame. This room was connected to a hall, down which I found a bathroom. Mind you, everything was still completely foreign. Even the person in the mirror seemed so unlike me. Her hair stood up like stalks of winter wheat, her skin glowed Halloween green. I utterly could not recognize myself.
I searched for a sign of some feminine toiletry, any sliver of colored substance that would help transform me into a worldly “Cosmo girl.” Alas, all at hand was a bottle of unbranded benzoil peroxide, and an empty can of mousse. Oh, what a sorry sound to hear it sputter and hiss.
The bathtub was filthy. To shower meant risking fungal infection. Sitting on the sides were four empty bottles of cheap shampoo. A small towel hung still damp above a toilet sprouting public hairs. On the tank sat a dry shaving mug and a brush. “Men,” I thought. In desperation, I slumped over the sink cabinet and splashed my face. Who was that strange girl in the spotted mirror? Where did she get such a hideous perm? Why didn’t she take off her make-up the night before? What made her so puffy and bloated?
In the main living quarters of this apparent bachelor pad were huge six-by-eight foot posters. Musicians posed erotically, washed with florescent, drug culture designs. On a low coffee table I found crusty dishes and trendy magazines. On the sofa sat a dirty cloth purse, which yielded four dollars and a drivers license with a reasonable likeness of the girl in the mirror. So I took it.
Then I noticed a buzz from the corner. A bright light illuminated an elaborate fish tank. I scrutinized it with some wonder, and discovered two fishes in the muck. An anorexic angel fish paused, completely obsessed with her own world, while a diligent big sucker was sucking, trying to keep his home tidy for his partner. His quarter sized mouth pressed in a perfect flat circle against the tank’s side. His eyes looked desperate, as the tank was experiencing some neglect, and the algae was creeping in. I found some food and sprinkled it in, but the two did not seem to notice.
Next to the tank was a large nicely varnished door. I ran my finger across it and turned three golden bolt locks. I felt a ping in my gut, like I was leaving home, never to return. But this was certainly not my home.
On my way out my foot kicked something. I quickly picked it up. It was a lemon book with red script letters. Perhaps someone left it underneath the door, but it may have belonged to the boys who lived with the fish, or even the strange, mysterious girl who woke up this morning, alone on a mattress on a bare-wood floor. I took it with me as I made my escape.
Alone again in this wet paved world I found outside. The house that contained the unknown apartment was in a very gentrified neighborhood. Rows of graystones, gargoyles and wrought iron fences formed the long corridors through which I wandered. Striving to be casual, I stopped to ask directions from a little lawn jockey in someone’s front garden. He just shook his little black face and said, “I don’t know where I am, and I sure don’t know how I got here, but this whole situation damn pisses me off!”
Within a short time I found myself in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. Business people in day-dress littered the main street. Carefree seeming walks, but industrious they were. Their faces showed purpose and ambition, almost attractive. After a dozen or so of these faces passed by I began to wonder who they had sex with last night and what bar they had picked them up at. “This lady frequents sports bars, and him? He goes to jazz clubs, definitely!” Most of the men looked like news anchormen wearing pancake base. The ladies’ brunette hair never moved, but I couldn’t be sure if they were wearing shoulder pads, or were just plain tense.
The ground kept flowing rapidly beneath my feet. My gut was heavy, and my back was smoldering stiff. It was hard to deal with the parade of strangers whooshing by me, all alone and unconnected. “Maybe that’s how people do it, ” I thought, “Treat sex just like walking to work.”
Eventually I happened on a greasy spoon, with a hand painted sign advertising “broasted chicken” on the storefront. The place was unpretentious and gritty, but not without a certain charm, and I found myself drifting in for hope of food and shelter. The woman wiping the counter had probably spent a great amount of her life in the shelter of a restaurant, eating, smoking, going from flirt to flirt to keep herself interested in life. Her weathered frame still had spunk, but it would not get her tips like it used to. And her thickened gray hair refused to hide behind a melon rinse.
She slunk back to the waitress station at the far end of the counter, to smoke a menthol. She lit it seductively, and leaned over to a skinny, balding man eating eggs swiftly in a booth..
“Where did you say you worked?” she cooed.
“Shipping. Imports.”
“You lucky in cards?”
“I haven’t played cards in years. No time.”
“You know what they say, honey,” she said, batting her false eyelashes. “So far, I’ve been lucky in love.”
What a come on! Now, this was a person I wanted to reach out to. Someone real. I smiled with as much warmth and width as I could and sat myself at a stool. But the waitress, annoyed that I had interrupted her ancient mating ritual, failed to greet me with hospitality. She ignored my eyes, clanked down my water and a one-page laminated menu, and darted away.
Suddenly, I smelled men. My hands, my face, and the black garb I was draped in reeked of maleness. It occurred to me that the melon-topped waitress might have caught a whiff and became disgusted. Or maybe, the odor was acting on her subconsciously, one female animal to another, telling her to protect her territory.
Just then, a scraggly man on the stool next to me reached for a packet of saccharin and brushed against my arm Then he grabbed for the salt and bumped my shoulder. Then, his knee rubbed against my thigh, and I became very agitated. He leaned close to my ear. My spine prickled.
“What’ll you do for a nickel, girlie?” he said, sliding a coin my way.
I followed the coin with my eyes. Now, this was a very sad old man. Obviously, nobody loved him. Who was I to cause a scene and treat him like dirt?
“Fuck off, asshole,” I said.
He went “humph” and inched away to his breakfast.
The coffee came, in went the cream, and the ketchup bloodied the cottage cheese. The man beside me made a verbal comment about my eating habits. I spooned a bit of red-stained lumps into my mouth eagerly. He grumbled again and left. I was relieved.
And sitting there this morning, dabbing my spoon in my cottage cheese, I began to wonder who I was. And as I tried to remember what had happened the night before, and the year before, I became baffled. My mind was spinning. My lungs wanted abuse to side-track my thoughts. I looked in the purse I assumed to be mine, and pulled out a cigarette. It was scratchy and brittle and a choice that I made. And since I was smoking, and I was alone in the universe, and I was bored and there was nothing better to do, I pulled out the book I had kicked on the floor of the strange apartment an hour earlier.
The book I held delicately in my hands had no dust jacket, only the lemon binding with embellished red type, “Tristan and Isolde.” Nothing else was printed on the outside. No mention of an author could be found anywhere. No biography on the final page, no headers on the body of the work. In fact, the entire book design was completely out of the ordinary: no publisher, no copyright date, no city of publication, no library of congress number, no ISBN, and incidentally, no page numbers, with font type as small and as plain as any desktop had ever dared.
However, there was a preface, and although my policy is usually to skip any introductory material, I decided to go ahead and give it try, as it might help me get a handle on what currently appeared to be my only companion. I sipped my coffee and read.
“Storytelling, so far as anyone can tell, is as old as mankind and as new as today. Any tale is old to someone who knows it, and new to someone who does not. The number of plots, as any literature or drama student might know, is limited: Boy meets Girl, Loss of Innocence, Man against Nature, Man against Himself. It is the inspired storyteller who transforms these timeless themes into modern vehicles with new voices, while still retaining that magical universal quality which makes a story great.
“The story that follows was found in a brown paper bag on a sidewalk in front of the Cyfarwyddiaid Church, Chicago, early in fall, 1987. Next to it was a broken bottle of Wild Irish Rose liquor, a black scarf, and a rather soiled pair of women’s panties. We can only wonder at the origin of such a piece. In other words, your guess is as good as ours.” And it was signed, “The Foundation for Unidentified Literary Phenomena.” They left no address.
It was then I realized, I had no panties, and this was the book of my life.